Leopold Sedar Senghor Liberte 1:Negritude et Humanisme. On ...

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The historical facts matter, too. It is important that a black African confronted
the entire edifice of then-current Western theory about race, accepted
it more or less on its own terms (with some modifications by paleontologists
like Teilhard), and then found a way to turn it on its head: Senghor used
Western knowledge itself to say African experience represented something
every bit as important as European experience. That this feat later came
to seem pointless because those old theories of race were pushed aside in
favor of newer theories does not lessen Senghor’s achievement. Reinterpreting
European ideas in the light of African experience, he found something
essential that black Africa could contribute to a French civilization
wallowing in military defeat, imperial decline, and materialist emptiness.
If there is a question that remains after reading Senghor, it is what he
actually meant by “Civilization of the Universal,” a phrase that comes from
Teilhard. Senghor made much of Teilhard’s insistence that unity alone permits
differentiation and that difference is complementary, not hierarchical.
Yet the unity Senghor saw in Africa fell victim to a hundred particularisms.
His projected West African federation foundered at Independence.
His political coalition cracked within two years of his presidency. The ideal
Africa of his memory/theory disolved under the pressures of dependent
development. (If one peruses the later volumes of Liberté, one finds him in
1975 paraphrasing Goethe somewhat mournfully, saying “everyone should
be hybrid [métis] inhisownway” [Liberté 5, p. 51]). As a practicing politician
Senghor changed with his times, but like all politicians he could not
change fast enough nor escape the prices he had paid for power. For all their
size and authority, social structures change much faster than men, and the
ideologies that made Senghor an ideal leader for peaceful independence
did not serve as well in a nation suddenly on its own and challenged by internal
differences that had been hidden by the fact of a commonly suffered
imperialism. In the active world, there can be no man for all seasons.
But what Senghor bequeathed us as social scientists is not his political
heritage, but a body of social thought unlike any other. For he addressed one
of the great questions of his century—the question of race—through the
unusual perspective of a lyrical sensibility. He wrote his ideas in poems. He
elaborated them across dozens of occasional pieces. He avoided consistency
of argument for consistency of sens. For it is the consistency of his immediate
sensibility as a thinker that one encounters when reading Senghor. Not
an argument summarizable in short statements or an example of this or
that position. Instead, one encounters a unique man with a unique perspective
compounded of unique experience. He has the gift to tell his thoughts
in page after page of beautiful prose and poetry. There is only one Sédar
Senghor.
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